Like an old shaman from the deep African interior, Robert Mugabe is like a cat with more than the proverbial nine lives, seemingly indestructible. The old wizard of Harare had survived impossible odds and taken frightening political gambles. Just when you think he was about to buckle under the pressure, he seemed to have discovered the extraordinary reserves of resilience and energy to push on. Like all old freedom fighters, politics was seen as only the secondary theatre of actual hostilities. Mugabe was not going to be fazed by mere political uproar.
But sometimes this past week, something seemed to have snapped. Events unfolding in Zimbabwe are so unique that they demand fresh political perspectives. It was an end that was not quite an end. It was a coup that was described as a non-coup by its executors, except that the old regime was toppled, its principal forcibly restricted and his freedom of movement curtailed. The old revolutionary has become a victim of the new round of the “revolution”.
This is not a counter-revolution as such but a continuation of the old revolution in another form. Unlike the usual adversarial coup in which rival factions of a rogue ruling class duel onto death, this is not your usual coup of hate and violence, but a coup of affection and complicity of ultimate objective. It is the nearest thing to a velvet coup ; a quarrel among old comrades still held together by the old confraternal code and shared vision.
This is where new contradictions replace old contradictions. What has happened in Harare is not an endgame but a dead-end game. Please permit this new coinage. In an endgame, events conspire to arrive at a swift point of no return. In a dead-end game it is the game itself and the rules of engagement that have reached a dead end and must be reinvented accordingly if the players must survive.
In the Zimbabwean maelstrom, it is arguable that the old freedom-fighter caste of the ruling ZANU party felt its future endangered and its fortunes at risk as a result of Mugabe’s senile antics. They have after all sided with the old Shona lion in all his assaults against democracy and genuine economic reform in Zimbabwe.
Even when he had not won elections and the people of Zimbabwe appeared genuinely tired him, the military as a proxy of the old wing of anti-colonial fighters have provided him with the political teeth and military muscles to quell all opposition to his increasingly eccentric and authoritarian rule. This emergent aristocratic caste could not contemplate life under the leadership of a political upstart and pushy termagant like Grace Mugabe who did not have any revolutionary credentials unlike Sally, Mugabe’s revered first wife, or Winnie Mandela. Under Grace, a former typist often derisively referred to as Grace Gucci or Disgrace, the old revolution would have unravelled in a spool of anarchy.
They were willing to turn a blind eye to their leader and old beloved comrade’s ethical failings and peccadilloes as the affliction to which great men are prone as long as it does not affect their present standing or endanger their collective destiny. But with Mugabe openly and frantically gaming to have his wife enthroned as a successor, it became a bridge too far.
It is useful to keep this background in mind in order have a clear perspective about what is happening in Zimbabwe. The military intervention in the past week is not a radical push against the established post-Rhodesia order but an attempt to conserve and consolidate the gains of the revolt against the old White-Settler master-class and the indigenous colonial money-bags.
This is not to condemn the new Zimbabwean ruling class but to appreciate its historical dilemma. Irrespective of their political trajectory and historical evolution, most African countries face the critical problem of transition from the old authoritarian societies to political modernity. In many of these countries, this transition resonates with trauma and tempest. In many of them, the reality of colonial occupation and the need to find an appropriate political structure and governance architecture for the new country is as daunting as it is nation-disabling.
Zimbabwe is one of the African countries that won independence from the colonial masters not on a platter of gold but on the platform of bloody confrontation followed by protracted negotiations. As we have seen in the case of Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, Kenya, Algeria and Namibia, the triumphant indigenous freedom-fighter caste normally maintains a stranglehold on the political and economic trajectory of the nation until modernity is achieved one way or the other. The only exception is South Africa which had already achieved a transition to First World political and economic modernity even as it transited from the monstrous regimen of Apartheid rule.
At the age of ninety three and possibly older, it was obvious that Robert Mugabe was past his prime physically, mentally and psychologically. The old man was beginning to fall asleep in the wrong places which itself was a metaphor for sheer political exhaustion. His sharp judgement and political reflex could no longer be trusted.
It is only in surviving African fiefdoms, traditional templates and kingdoms that you will find a ninety three year old ruling. Yet it was obvious that despite his mental, physical and psychological frailties, Mugabe might have concluded that only death could part him from power. He had become a relic and reminder of inglorious history.
In the event, what eventually did it for Mugabe was an error of judgement and a lapse of political reflex so catastrophic that it is possible to conclude that the old man had lost it completely and was a clear and present danger to his country and ruling Nomenclatura. The sacking and disgrace of the former Vice President, Emmerson Mnangagwa, was akin to political self-immolation.
Mnangagwa was not your run of the mill political jobber and colourless apparatchic. With the lidded stare of a cold-blooded animal, he was not known as the crocodile for nothing. He knew where all the old bodies were buried. As a sixteen year old, he survived being executed for a train bombing on the grounds that he was a minor. The others were shot by the White Settler minority regime.
Impressively credentialed as a freedom fighter with links to the military, diplomatic and business community, his sacking must have sent the alarm bells ringing in many post-revolutionary camps around Harare. It was obvious that Magabe was ready to go to any length to impose and install his unworthy wife as his successor. If he can do this to the most impressive political figure in the country after himself, he would do it to anybody. Self-preservation is the first law of politics. It was time to move against the old comrade.
This is a play of giants and it was quite understandable why there were no crowds cheering last Tuesday on the streets of Harare. The real people of Zimbabwe are quite removed from the power struggle and contention for supremacy among rival factions of the ruling bloc. Yet in many of the slums and the rural areas, Mugabe, despite running the country aground, politically, socially and economically, remains the father of the nation and a much revered icon. There is something Shakespearean about this tragedy, a great and noble man brought low by hubris and political rapacity.
So why did Robert Mugabe do it in this appalling way, bringing his country to economic and political ruination when a more humane and compassionate template of transition was available next door in South Africa? The obvious answer is that every country is unique in its peculiar contradictions and South Africa is not Zimbabwe.
Perhaps the key to unlocking the mystery is to re-examine the nature of settler-colonization in the two countries. It may well be that because it was more isolated, less compact and less entrenched than the more politically sophisticated and philosophically coherent culture of apartheid in South Africa, the White-settler community in Zimbabwe felt more threatened and endangered. Hence, the resort to unimaginable physical brutality and primitive violence in the prosecution of the war against native “terrorists”.
It was said that Robert Mugabe was so appalled by the brutality and personal torture he was subjected to that he became permanently embittered against the old Rhodesian white-settlers. This was quite unlike the attitude of the Boer leadership which took a decision to cultivate and engage with Nelson Mandela despite the overt climate of hostilities once it became obvious that he was going to pay a lead role in post-Apartheid transition.
But in spurning reconciliation and going after his old enemies, Mugabe has brought his country very low indeed. It was said that after Mugabe’s half-hearted attempts at reconciliation were spurned by the western community, he became more and more intransigent and Anglophobic. Yet like Nelson Mandela, his friend and old comrade, he was a natural Anglophile and was said to have been personally devastated by the annulment of his knighthood by the British establishment.
Once again, and with the coup of last Tuesday, history has presented the Zimbabwean nation an opportunity to start afresh. Unknown to Mugabe, while he was making a fetish of firing Mnangagwa, the old crocodile was making overtures to the military, business and intelligence communities and offering a template for the way forward in a post-Mugabe Zimbabwe.
With the velvet coup of Wednesday morning and the easing out of the old lion of Harare, the first stage of the template is all but operationalized. It is the next stage that is bound to bring more turbulence and uproar. For too long, the Zimbabwe nation and the post White-Settler state have suffered a crass entombment by the ruling party and its old freedom fighter caste.
Voting and counting of vote do not matter as much as those who decide whether the voting and counting will count. It is called the abolition of the electorate. If this old autocratic and authoritarian model is what Mnangagwa and the military authorities in Zimbabwe have in mind, they have surprises waiting for them. It is now time to open up Zimbabwe to political and economic modernity as well as the Twenty First century.
